Posts for August, 2018

August 2018

2018 Annual Regional Juried Exhibition

Published August 31, 2018

The Guild of Boston Artists is proud to present this year's Annual Regional Juried Exhibition at 162 Newbury St, Boston MA 02116 from September 8 - 29. Each year, the exhibition provides a significant opportunity for talented New England artists working in the realist tradition to exhibit their work and compete for prestigious awards. The competition is designed for non-member artists from eastern and western Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine. This year, the Guild received the largest number of submissions in the Juried Exhibition's 13 year history, promising a highly competitive selection process and a showing of the best of representational painting in New England.

An awards reception will be held on September 8, 2018 and an opportunity to meet the award winners will be held on September 22, 2018. All events are free and open to the public. Please RSVP to reserve a seat.

Devotion to Drawing

Published August 29, 2018

Renowned as a giant of French Romantic painting, Eugène Delacroix was equally a dedicated and an innovative draftsman. Through a selection of more than one hundred works on paper—from finished watercolors to sketchbooks, from copies after old master prints to preparatory drawings for important projects—this exhibition explores the central role of drawing in Delacroix's practice.

Impressions of Shandong and South Australia

Published August 28, 2018

To celebrate the 30th anniversary of the establishment of the sister relationship between Shandong province and the state of South Australia, seven artists from Shandong visited South Australia in September 2016. The following year in May, five South Australian artists, among them ARC Associate Living Master™
Louise Fenely, visited Shandong, China to explore the landscape and culture. The results are a unique collection of works by the twelve participating artists inspired by the landscape and people of South Australia and Shandong.

New ARC Approved Atelier

ARC is pleased to welcome the Julian Ashton Art School as a new ARC ApprovedSM Atelier!

The Julian Ashton Art School was founded by Julian Rossi Ashton in 1890 and is Australia's oldest continuous Fine Art School.

The school's core philosophy is to encourage fine drawing and sound practice in the craft of painting. Students may gain basic skills and pursue a personal course to the very highest level of technical prowess without having to engage with current theories about the nature of art.

Painting the Figure Now

Published August 24, 2018

Painting the Figure Now is an exhibition of paintings that investigate the many ways we see the human figure today, showing contemporary approaches to portraiture, narrative, and any and all visualizations focusing on the human form in life, action, play, work and repose.

This show is co-curated by by Didi Menendez of the ARC Allied Organization, PoetsArtists, and Walt Morton.

The exhibition runs until September 23, 2018 and takes place at Wausau Museum of Contemporary Art 309 McClellan St, Wausau, WI 54403.

New ARC Allied Organization

Published August 23, 2018

ARC is pleased to welcome PoetsArtists as a new ARC Allied Organization.

PoetsArtists is a platform uniting artists, authors, art collectors, galleries and other art affiliated members. Their mission is to ignite creativity and connect an already strong community with further artistic and literary opportunities. They publish issues 8 to 12 times a year focusing on Contemporary Figurative Realism, Portraiture, and Poetry.

Five and Under

Published August 17, 2018

Arcadia Contemporary will be holding the show "Five and Under" for the grand opening exhibition in their new gallery in Pasadena, California. "Five and Under" features contemporary realism works from over 50 international artists, all priced at $5,000 or less. ARC Living Master™ Julio Reyes and ARC Associate Living Master™ Alex Callaway will be among the artists participating in this special exhibition.

The exhibition runs from August 18 - September 7 with the opening reception: Saturday, August 18, 6 - 9pm. Aracadia Contemporary is located on Old Town Pasadena, 39 East Colorado Blvd., Pasadena, CA 91105.

New Podcast Added to Video and Podcast Page

Published August 15, 2018

A new podcast has been added to the Video and Podcast page in the Education section of the ARC Website.

Skill-Based Art: A Learning Resource for Art Students and Artist-Teachers, conducts interviews and audio podcasts with artists who trained during the twentieth century. Visit the website to hear interviews with Katherine Lack, wife of the late twentieth century artist, Richard F. Lack, ARC Living Masters™ Kirk Richards and Allan R. Banks, ARC Approved AtelierSM Instructor Rob Gutteridge and more. This resource is a growing body of work being conducted by Emilio Longo, visual arts teacher and author.

ARC Allied Organizations

Published August 14, 2018

The Art Renewal Center is dedicated to bringing realism back to the visual arts. To better accomplish our mission and return sanity back to the visual arts, we have allied ourselves with like-minded organizations in the hopes that through our joint efforts, we will be more successful at bringing realist art back to the world at large.

All of the ARC Allied Organizations, whether they are artists' societies or magazines, have the common goal of promoting high quality representational art.

Water, Wind, and Waves: Marine Paintings from the Dutch Golden Age

Published August 13, 2018

This exhibition explores the deep, multifaceted relationship the Dutch had with the water in the seventeenth century, including their gratitude for the sea’s bounty and their fear of its sometimes destructive power. Drawn largely from the National Gallery’s own collection, the exhibition features nearly 50 paintings, prints, drawings, rare books, and ship models. From quiet harbor scenes and frozen canals to fierce naval battles pitting Dutch crews against their Spanish foes, the range of images reveals the extraordinary impact the water had on art of the Dutch Golden Age.

The exhibition runs from July 1 – November 25, 2018 at the National Gallery of Art, 3rd and 9th Streets along Constitution Avenue NW Washington, DC 20001.

New Article on ARC

Published August 12, 2018

How Artists Can Begin Selling More Artwork is a book review of Eric Rhoads’ book Make More Money Selling Your Art, written by Kara Lysandra Ross, ARC Co-Chair and Chief Operating Officer. Eric Rhoads is an artist and a career entrepreneur, with 30 years’ experience of launching companies and media brands, creating startups, and building businesses. He is known to the ARC viewership as being Chairman of the board of Streamline Publishing, Inc, which produces such publications as
Fine Art Connoisseur magazine, PleinAir Magazine, and Streamline Art Video, as well as hosts events such as the Plein Air Convention and Expo and the Figurative Art Convention and Expo.

“Considering that there are so many purely conceptual artists out there somehow hitting it big and making a name for themselves without the technical skills to back it up, one has to conclude that there is another factor at play. Many people think it is all about who you know and what connections you have. Although these things can and do help, a lot of what makes an artist successful financially and enables them to sell their works has a lot to do with how they present themselves and their work. In short how they market themselves and their work to the public and the powers that be. When it comes to being financially successful as an artist, painting, sculpting or drawing amazing works is not enough, because if you don't get your works out there for people to see, no one will know about you. In Eric Rhoads book, Make More Money Selling Your Art, he addresses this concept and how to market oneself as an artist in a systematic way to make it easy for artists to understand how to market themselves and their work.”

ARC Website Feature - My Albums

Published August 10, 2018

When the Art Renewal Center website relaunched, several new features were added to the site to create a better and more user-friendly experience for our registered members.

My Albums has been designed to help our visitors save and organize their favorite artworks on the ARC website in one convenient place. Artworks can be saved into as many albums as users wish to create, for easy access.

To utilize this feature, log in to the ARC website, or create a free account if you are not a member. Click "Search the ARC Museum" and browse for your favorite artworks. To add an artwork to your album, simply click the star located on top of the image on the artist's main page, or if you are viewing the full size image, click the star at the bottom. A pop-up window will appear showing the image. Click the blue button that says "Create Album," type in the title you wish to use for your album and click "Create." To save to an existing album, just click the check mark on the right next to the album of your choice. Once you have saved the image to an album, click anywhere on the page to close the pop-up window.

Albums can be kept private or be made public to share with your family and friends.

To view all of the images in your album, just navigate to "My ARC" on the menu bar on the top of the website and click "My Albums" to see all of your selections. Over 1,000 albums have already been created by ARC users, so join in and create your own!

ARC Philosophy

The essay argues point by point why realism is one of the only effective ways to communicate ideas and emotions across cultures and centuries.

“The visual fine arts of drawing, painting and sculpture are best understood as a language ... a visual language. Very much like spoken and written languages, it was developed and preserved as a means of communication. And very much like language it is successful if communication takes place and unsuccessful if it does not. This simultaneously helps define the term "Fine Art." So fine art is one important way that human beings can communicate. This realization conversely poses the question: Can it be fine art if it does not communicate or does not even attempt to do so? Communication can only occur if the language of the speaker is understood by those who are listening. An absolute necessity for communication is that the language employed has vocabulary and grammar shared by speaker and listener or by writer and reader and therefore logically by painter and viewer. “

Whistler and Pennell: Etching the City

Published August 8, 2018

Whistler and Pennell: Etching the City captures the changing landscape of New York and London in the final years of the industrial revolution. Featuring 38 prints from two of the most influential and innovative etchers - James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) and Joseph Pennell (1857-1926), the exhibition highlights an important period in the history of etching known as the 'Etching Revival'. It explores how both artists championed a declining art medium, and their motivation to create a definitive technique and style.

Wanderlust From Caspar David Friedrich to Auguste Renoir

Published August 7, 2018

With Rousseau’s call to get “back to nature!” and Goethe’s Sturm und Drang poetry, wandering around 1800 became the expression of a modern awareness of life. As part of a reaction against the rapid social changes that began in the French Revolution, a new form of decelerated self- and world knowledge developed, whose presence can still be felt today.

The works shown in the exhibition, including masterworks by Friedrich, Schinkel, Dahl, Richard Wilson, Courbet, Kramskoi, Renoir, and more, show just how powerful and fruitful the motif of the wanderer was in art throughout the nineteenth century, not only in Germany but in many places, from France and Great Britain to Denmark, Norway and Russia.

The Eye of the Beholder

Published August 6, 2018

The Eye of the Beholder will feature new works from ARC Living MasterTM Sergio Roffo, ARC Associate Living MasterTM Thomas Kegler, and Kathleen Dunphy.

In this exhibition, Dunphy, Kegler and Roffo show the beauty they see in their wonderful compositions of streams, mountains, sunsets, shorelines and more. The show's opening reception is on August 11th from 5-7 PM.

The show is on view from August 11- 24, 2018 at Tree's Place, Rte 6A at 28 Orleans, MA 02653 and is free and open to the public.

The Bennett Prize

Published August 3, 2018

The Bennett Prize, created in 2018, awards $50,000 to a woman artist to create her own solo exhibition of figurative realist paintings, which will travel the country. The Prize will propel the careers of women painters who have not yet realized full professional recognition, empowering new artists and those who have painted for many years. The Prize will expand opportunities for the public, who may not be familiar with figurative realist painting, to learn more about the creative vision of talented women painters in this increasingly popular genre.

The call for entries ends on Sept. 28, 2018 at 11:59 p.m.

Please visit the Call for Entries page for more details, including the current prize timeline and rules for entry.

Saints and patrons unite for final push in re-birth of Plautilla Nelli's Last Supper

Published August 1, 2018

Florentine Renaissance painter Plautilla Nelli created the only early Last Supper by a woman artist and signed her massive 21 foot long masterwork with a call to action: 'Pray for the 'paintress'. Advancing Women Artists (AWA), a US-based non-profit which has been restoring art by women in Florence for over a decade, has taken Nelli's petition literally: Pray for the paintress so that the hidden half of the Renaissance may be fully revealed and encourage art lovers the world over to safeguard Nelli's creative artistic legacy through restoration.

AWA's 'Adopt an Apostle' program is Phase II of 'TheFirstLast', a four-year restoration, in collaboration with the Municipality of Florence, that was launched in 2015. The 'adoption' of the painting’s figures by individuals throughout the world will catapult the project toward completion, making Nelli's Last Supper ready for exhibition in Florence’s Museum of Santa Maria Novella in October 2019.

2018 ARA Boston Figure Painting Competition Reveal and Award Ceremony

Published August 1, 2018

ARA Boston, an ARC Approved AtelierSM, has brought together some of the top figurative artists in the world to work for 5 days straight from a live model in competition for big cash prizes. This year's pose will be taken directly from a nineteenth century work by an academic master. The competitors have the challenge of giving the pose a new context that will alter its original meaning and make it relevant to a contemporary audience. The awards ceremony is open to the public and will be held on Saturday August 4th from 1 to 4 PM at the Guild of Boston Artists located at 162 Newbury St, Boston, MA 02116. Come meet the artists, judges and enjoy wonderful art.

Lorenzo Lotto - Portraits

Published August 1, 2018

The Museo del Prado is presenting the first major exhibition on Lorenzo Lotto’s portraits. Co-organised with the National Gallery in London, it is benefiting from the sole sponsorship of Fundación BBVA and is the Museum’s most important exhibition this summer.

The exhibition focuses on already known aspects of Lotto’s portraiture such as their psychological depth and complex symbolism. In addition, it explores the artist’s use of similar resources in his portraits and religious works, the importance of the objects present in the portraits as reflections of material culture of the day, and the creative process behind the realization of these works.